A Nonfiction Book
Who doesn’t live with the failure of their subjective reality to totally “fit” with their social reality?
To help illuminate Philip Rieff’s thought and to study overlaps, we will now explore the thinking of sociologist Peter L. Berger. Relevant to the concerns of both Rieff and Berger, in his introduction to his book Hitler (covering 1936–45), Ian Kershaw wrote:
‘To call Hitler evil may well be both true and morally satisfying. But it explains nothing. And unanimity in condemnation is even potentially an outright barrier to understanding and explanation. As I hope the following chapters make abundantly plain, I personally find Hitler a detestable figure and despise all that his regime stood for. But that condemnation scarcely helps me to understand why millions of German citizens who were mostly ordinary human beings, hardly innately evil, in general interested in the welfare and daily cares of themselves and their families, like ordinary people everywhere, and by no means wholly brainwashed or hypnotized by spellbinding propaganda or terrorized into submission by ruthless repression, would find so much of what Hitler stood for attractive — or would be prepared to fight to the bitter end in a terrible war against the mighty coalition of the world’s most powerful nations arrayed against them.’¹
The work of Peter Rieff and Peter L. Berger can help us understand this phenomenon which horrified Hannah Arendt and Kershaw, even if perhaps they cannot provide us with the whole answer. Arguably, this horrific situation Kershaw described is the extreme but logical end of the “culture war” Dr. Hunter has warned us about for decades. On the “culture war,” Hunter wrote:
‘In sum, the root of this conflict are competing understandings of the good and how the good is grounded and legitimated. These understandings are reflected in competing moral visions of collective life and the discourse sustaining those visions. In turn, these are manifested in competing institutions (their elites and their interests) that generate this cultural output. All of this plays out dialectically.’²
The German people believed what they were doing was “right,” “reasonable,” and “acceptable,” and that “goodness” hid from them the evil of their actions. Such self-delusion requires “competing understandings of the good” for normal people who sit down for dinner every night with their families to become Nazis: Nazism had to be seen as “a legitimate good” that needed to triumph socially, institutionally, militarily, and the like “over some evil” (which was “good” relative to those who participated in that supposed “evil,” as Liberals are supposedly “evil” to many Conservatives and vice-versa). Nazism was a development in the social order that changed the social order, and failure to understand how profoundly it did so made the German people unable to stop it. Likewise, on the “culture war,” Hunter warned that ‘a denial of deep difference makes us inattentive to important developments in the social order that, whether people like it or not, are challenging anew the ideals and institutions of liberalism.’³ Ignorant, we have been caught off guard by recent social developments, as manifest in Brexit and Trump, and the key is to understand that people naturally deem “moral” on the social level that which helps them regain a “fit” between their “subjective realities” and their “social realities” (similar to how we can erroneously associate “certainty” with “truth”), which is to say that whatever increases “existential stability” is deemed ethical (regardless how immoral the person, thing, etc. might actually be).
This broad overview described, let us now explore the thinking of Peter Berger, starting with Making Sense of Modern Times, a collection of essays about Berger, edited by Dr. James Davison Hunter.
‘Human life is only possible if that precarious, threatening, and frightening world is kept at bay by a protective canopy of systems of meaning.’⁴ We cannot live in chaos or senseless, and the point of society is to provide us with what we require. This basic fact about society leaves open numerous questions though: Who decides how much order is needed? When is order worth risking discrimination? By what standard? And so on. For reasons of basic cultural, racial, economic, and religious diversity:
‘[T]here will [always] be competing definitions of reality between social groups which may well be threatening to individuals. These imperfections indicate that socialization cannot ever be totally successful in the sense that there will always be a lack of fit between subjective reality and objective reality.’⁵
Herein lies why the possibility (if not likelihood) of social uprising, populist backlash, and the like is built into the nature of society itself. Modernity and Pluralism make the always-socially-present “lack of fit” between subjective and social reality feel all the more intense and extreme, increasing the likelihood that there will be social reaction and upheaval. It is because of this tension that movements like Nazism, Brexit, and Trump are possible (and arguably likely, especially if what Rieff warned about isn’t taken seriously). These movements represent attempts of individuals to reestablish order for their subjective realities by changing social reality back to that which feels “given” (“to make America great again” basically means “to make a certain way of life ‘given’ again”). By “given” here (to review) I mean a reality that is so true to those who ascribe to it that they don’t even think about the fact that it is true (similar to how we don’t walk around thinking about gravity unless it is directly pointed out to us, as Heidegger’s “doorknob” isn’t noticed until it’s broken). The reality is our facticity — our very standard against which we determine what “is” from what “is not” — and so for our “given” to be threatened is for our very standard by which we determine how to live to be threatened (which hints at how we can become Nazis: the Nazism “sneaks under” the possibility of critique and detection, “below,” on the level of “standard”). Without such a standard, all we have is chaos, and to save ourselves from this and existential anxiety, we can tragically turn to Nazism and other desperate means.
People in a society know that they are surrounded by people who disagree with them, but everyone necessarily ascribes to their worldview as if it is so true that the other worldviews aren’t even really worldviews, but falsities and illusions. ‘[C]ompared to the paramount reality of everyday life’ of a given person, other possible worldviews virtually don’t exist; a belief must (“practically”) be a fact to the believer.⁶ And it seems that this is how people must live — not ever taking “too” seriously the existence of other worldviews in a strange and paradoxical “balancing act” which we can never “look at too clearly” or the whole act will fall apart (for we will have removed from ourselves a necessary degree of “plausible deniability” )— because taking them “too seriously” is simply too existentially destabilizing and prone to cause conflict (even if this should “logically follow” from the existence of multiple worldviews themselves). And yet this seems to be exactly what Pluralism can demand of everyday people: to take “too seriously” multiple realities. This isn’t to say Pluralism is wrong to demand that people respect diversity and love people who think differently from them, but rather to say that Pluralism, in all of its nobility and truth, existentially requires of citizens something that is extraordinarily difficult to accept: they must live as what they believe is what everyone ought to believe while everyone at the same time ascribes to a different ought. In the midst of this, it is very difficult for a given person to feel as if their “ought” maintains the same robustness and plausibility that it once did, resulting in profound existential anxiety that makes probable horrible social uprising to reestablish “givenness.”
To help explain this, let us make an example of the Trump election. It seems many people voted for Trump because they wanted to restore their “America” (Christian, Capitalistic, etc.) back to being a “given” to them. Whether good or bad, that ideology has ceased feeling robust and plausible to millions of people, thanks to the forces of Pluralism. Economic concerns are also important (for when the economy is weak, “givens” are weakened, for the functionality and “good” of an ideology is questioned), but I think economic factors can sometimes over-dominate analysis. Personally, I think we make a terrible mistake if we overlook the role of existential anxiety in human action, for that anxiety can help explain why people would vote for a candidate they didn’t like (as many people seem to have done regarding Trump): they felt they had no choice to restore “givens.” Is this bigotry and closemindedness? Perhaps, but it would be erroneous to assume that such explains how voters of Trump justified voting for Trump to themselves. In their minds, restoring “givenness” isn’t necessarily a bigoted act (even if that is “practically” the outcome), but a necessary “last ditch effort” to save America from decline. I believe many voted for Trump out of existential desperation, and the same goes with Brexit. If “existential desperation” is inherent in Pluralism, seeing as Pluralism is irreversible, we have a problem.
In Pluralism, there are countless groups of people who are trying to live with the failure of their subjective realities to totally “fit” with their social realities, and when that tension becomes too great, the “givenness” of a given group’s reality begins to fade, and this can lead to social uprisings and problems (especially if the group is large). Everyone naturally wants their subjective reality and ideology to feel like a “given,” and every election now seems increasingly like a competition between groups who want to restore and/or establish “givenness” to what they believe. One group will always lose, and hence one group will always feel like they have hope while others will feel increasingly hopeless. When people are hopeless, they become desperate, and where there is desperation, tyrants and foolishness can reign. The bigger the government, the more hopeless people will feel when they lose elections, and when that hopelessness becomes too much for them to bear, we shouldn’t be surprised when nations rage.⁷
Where there is Pluralism, there will be a reduction of “givenness” for every group, and yet every group must “practically” want an increase in “givenness” (for we naturally desire “existential stability”). Arguably, it would seem we “practically” must believe everyone should think like us, (even if we “intellectually” know we shouldn’t think this way), for we must live as if what we believe is true (and/or “part of truth”), which means everyone “ought” to believe it. And the desire for “givenness” increases as Pluralism ever-multiplies (Taylor’s “Nova Effect”), precisely because “givenness” wanes, meaning anxiety grows.⁸ Inherent to Pluralism then is a dramatic, existential tension that must necessarily intensify as Pluralism spreads. Pluralism is “practically” a competition of “givens” that is not possible for everyone (if anyone) to win, and it is this very competition which makes likely social and tyrannical uprisings. And yet Pluralism can’t be reversed (and arguably shouldn’t be). Faced with this problem, there can be a temptation to try to enforce diversity and acceptance from “the top down” using centralized power, but unfortunately this only intensifies the existential tension, for the central action necessarily reduces the robustness and “givenness” of groups the central action threatens (as discussed by Conyers). Worse yet, as power is centralized for the sake of stabilizing Pluralism, there is increasingly a central power that a tyrant could seize control of, and as Pluralism grows, the likelihood of a social uprising that empowers a tyrant is increasingly plausible. I do not mean to say here that Pluralism necessarily leads to conflict or tyranny, only that it “practically” does, and that assuring this doesn’t occur will require great effort and work.
Those in Pluralism often feel as if they have fallen ‘from sacred canopy to homelessness’: from a society that was their home to a house that they do not recognize.⁹ Homelessness is ‘an existential state of anomie and alienation which is allegedly hard to bear psychologically and causes the recurrent emergence of nostalgia for a condition in which one can feel oneself at home again, at home in a society, in the universe, with oneself and with one’s fellow human beings.’¹⁰ “Homelessness,” as worsened by (but not reducible to) economic pains caused by inflation, automation (see Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford), and the like, is a strong reason for why Trump won and Brexit occurred (as is a desire to “escape freedom” and a state without “givens,” to allude to Erich Fromm), and I believe nostalgia can often be behind some of the great tragedies of history. It should be noted here, in line with the thought of Conyers, that ‘[i]f homelessness is typical of modern consciousness, [then it is probably the case that] technological production (or the world of work) and the bureaucratized state constitute the main structural realities within modern society, and function as the primary agents of modernization.’¹¹ Ironically, the State can grow precisely in response to this “homelessness” to stop it, and yet the State can cause it. Turning to the State is a temptation, for it seems to have the power to restore “givens,” and yet the price for this possibility risks Nazi Germany. The loss of “givens” may reduce the likelihood of Arendt’s “banality of evil,” but as “givens” are lost, the likelihood of a social uprising to restore “givens” rises. Hence, the process by which “the banality of evil” becomes unlikely is the process against which an uprising is likely.
‘This kaleidoscopic plurality has far-reaching consequences for the modern individual, since it forces him to make choices, decisions, and plans all the time. As a result, reality remains open and unfinished, and is subjected to a serious decline of taken-for-grantedness. The modern individual has to search for reality constantly, and in continuous deliberations and reflections future actions have to be planned. In the process, his sense of identity will change drastically […] identity in the modern plurality of vastly different life-worlds is doomed to be subjective, highly individuated and thus malleable and unstable.’¹²
Faced with Pluralism, as authoritarianism can be a temptation to restore “givens,” there can also be a temptation for groups to retreat from society into themselves. ‘If human beings retreat to subjectivism, they will gradually lose the capacity to transform nature into culture, to construct socially their own human reality. That is, they will become incapable of realizing any kind of freedom, creativity, and authenticity.’¹³
To close, I think it should be noted that Liberals might have the best psychological and existential strategy to deal with Pluralism (and so it is not by chance that they are often the biggest supporters of Pluralism). Faced with the loss of “givenness,” they ascent to an ideology which believes that there are no “givens” — pure and utter diversity and openness (perhaps Deleuzian) — their only “given” is that there are no “givens” (the only thing forbidden is forbidding, to allude to Rieff). Of all possible “givens,” this seems to be the only one Pluralism doesn’t threaten, but rather strengthens, and perhaps the premise is ultimately true. However, this “given” is hard to define from a nihilism that suggests there is no truth, for all beliefs make claims that contradict the claims of other beliefs (they all make “exclusive truth claims,” as Timothy Keller pointed out) — they cannot all be true. Still, ascribing to the “given that there are no givens” seems like a way of life that is more likely to provide existential and psychological stability than an ideology that ascents to “a less open given.”¹⁴ Perhaps we could survive Pluralism if we all became Liberal, but I fear it’s unlikely that, in the process, a “populist uprising” didn’t occur and undermine the effort. Furthermore, those who aren’t already Liberal, to become Liberal, would have to abandon a previous “given” for a new one — a journey that would likely make their new “given” feel less “given.”
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Notes
¹Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1946–45: Nemesis. New York, NY: W.W. North & Company, Inc., 2000: xvii.
²Hunter, Davison James and Alan Wolfe. Is There a Culture War? Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2006: 15.
³Hunter, Davison James and Alan Wolfe. Is There a Culture War? Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2006: 36.
⁴Making Sense of Modern Times. Edited by James Davison Hunter and Stephen C. Ainlay. Knowledge, Order, and Human Autonomy by Nicholas Abercrombie. New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc., 1986: 27.
⁵Making Sense of Modern Times. Edited by James Davison Hunter and Stephen C. Ainlay. Knowledge, Order, and Human Autonomy by Nicholas Abercrombie. New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc., 1986: 23.
⁶Making Sense of Modern Times. Edited by James Davison Hunter and Stephen C. Ainlay. The Encounter with Phenomenology by Stephen C. Ainlay. New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc., 1986: 45.
⁷This would suggest that perhaps the best way to keep Pluralism from self-destructing is to keep power from centralizing, but those favoring Pluralism tend to paradoxically also favor strong central power (for the sake of preserving justice, ending economic injustice, holding together diversity, and the like).
⁸Yes, some might be able to interpret the ever-multiplication of beliefs as evidence that other beliefs inflate preciously because there is no truth to anchor them, but I don’t believe it will be long before most realize that this line of argument works just as well against them in the eyes of other groups.
⁹Making Sense of Modern Times. Edited by James Davison Hunter and Stephen C. Ainlay. The Challenges of Modernity by Anton C. Zijderveld. New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc., 1986: 64.
¹⁰Making Sense of Modern Times. Edited by James Davison Hunter and Stephen C. Ainlay. The Challenges of Modernity by Anton C. Zijderveld. New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc., 1986: 66.
¹¹Making Sense of Modern Times. Edited by James Davison Hunter and Stephen C. Ainlay. The Challenges of Modernity by Anton C. Zijderveld. New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc., 1986: 66.
¹²Making Sense of Modern Times. Edited by James Davison Hunter and Stephen C. Ainlay. The Challenges of Modernity by Anton C. Zijderveld. New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc., 1986: 65.
¹³Making Sense of Modern Times. Edited by James Davison Hunter and Stephen C. Ainlay. The Challenges of Modernity by Anton C. Zijderveld. New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc., 1986: 63.
¹⁴Where nothing is “given,” it’s easier to critique on grounds of justice as opposed to truth, for though what constitutes justice is relative to truth, justice seems much more personal, more solid, and more self-evident.
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